I’m going to rant a bit about something that genuinely pisses me off to no end. I visit a website, for anything, and there are more than likely going to be videos. I don’t mind that one bit, some people prefer them….. But others do not.

Are you force feeding video to your visitors, causing rage?

I personally never view videos, that is unless the idiot who added the content to the page I am viewing did so ONLY in video. I have several reasons for this, many other people do as well.

1. I am very hearing impaired and even the top news channels are such poor audio quality I cannot understand them. Some have captions you may say.. Okay, you’re right, but I invite you to turn them on on your TV for a week and seen all the mistakes, missing verbiage and lag before you offer CC as a viable solution.
2. People, including myself might actually have manners and care that others around me do not want to hear what I am watching. Yes, manners, it’s really a thing.
3. If a user opens a link, even on a killer PC like mine and say they are doing ANYTHING else, the video causes lag, disruption and general funkiness on the other pages open.
4. Lastly, what about sight impaired users? They can’t watch that video and “get it” because of their disability. If there was text, they could use their screen reader.

So, the reason I am ranting is not only because I am a die-hard usability guru, but when looking up the sad and unfortunate attacks in Brussels today, CNN broke many of the rules above. I visited this page (notice the shitty link text? I also no-followed the link, because they DO NOT deserve an inbound link from me if they can’t practice proper accessibility for users). Immediately I was accosted by an exorbitant amount of ads, my browser became slow and sluggish, it AUTO-PLAYED some stupid and very irrelevant video ad which I was NOT even allowed to stop….

Then after I finally shut off the video they shoved down my throat and I am reading the text. Then I am interrupted after the first paragraph when my screen jumped up to allow the stupid video I had already turned off to be available in the right hand sidebar. All of my software, including browsers is 100% up to date, so no, I’m not to blame either. So I left… Raging and pissed off.

Back to Google and pick the number 5 result instead of the “best” result….

MUCH BETTER! Way to go New York Times! I visited their Brussels attack article here and wallah…. No laggyness, no video auto-starting anything, the ads are respectable and do not interfere with the article and even a slideshow was included to I could see the images without playing the video. Bravo. For the record, I did not nofollow the NYT link, they deserve my link juice!

Another question for another day might be why Google prefers a clearly non-accessible website over a website properly accessible for all or most? Guess maybe they need to practice what they preach….

Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.